Blog

At this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, our CEO had a opportunity to sit down with Richard Stiennon, founder and lead analyst at IT-Harvest, for an extended video discussion about what needs to change to fix the authentication problem. Over the next few months, we’ll be using our blog to share excerpts of that discussion.

It was certainly fitting that last week started with Groundhog Day, since it ended with another major breach that is reportedly the result of the same problems that cause over three-quarters of all data breaches - compromised credentials. The Anthem data breach should bring some major pause (again) to those at relying parties who are responsible for protecting sensitive data. As an industry, this is another opportunity to get things right.

Today marks another important moment for the FIDO Alliance. Google has announced Security Key, a physical USB second factor to provide an additional layer of protection for Google Accounts. This adds to the multiple second-factor choices Google users have to secure their online accounts from password compromises on their personal computers.

We see last week's move by Apple as a significant step in the right direction towards modernizing online payments and addressing a major problem in today's payment ecosystem using authentication as a key building block. The last twelve months have seen acceleration in investments in mobile commerce and payments powered by strong and simple authentication and we expect Apple's activities to add to the momentum.

Since our inception, we’ve been pretty vocal about what’s wrong with online authentication. If you are a follower of ours (or maybe if you’re not), you’ll likely agree that the use of passwords is the weakest security for authentication. However, Internet services continue to make consumers use a password as the primary method for access - even after breach after breach.

The FIDO Alliance has seen huge growth in membership from the 6 founding members at the public launch in February 2013, to over 100 today – including major market leaders such as Lenovo, ARM, Bank of America, Google, MasterCard, Microsoft and many more. The Alliance has achieved significant momentum in its mission to reinvent authentication - and this momentum is continued with the news that Samsung is also joining the Board of Directors.